Coal Handling at a Plant Site
The process of handling coal at a plant site is essentially concerned with several operations including receiving, unloading, measuring, stacking, storing, reclaiming, blending and ultimately transferring the material to the downstream process or eventual user location, such as a utility furnace or export terminal. The present invention provides and is primarily concerned with a method and apparatus for improved blending of bulk solid particulate material, such as coal, varying in chemical and physical composition including particle size and sulfur content and which may come from multiple mining sources. This blending is accomplished generally by a system in which coal having various chemical and physical properties is simultaneously and continuously recovered from live storage and displaced from planar surfaces to then fall onto a conveying means and accumulate in progressively increasing layers prior to being transported to the site of a downstream process. More detail of the horizontal plow system will be discussed later.
Modern power plants handling coal can take care of all the necessary processes from delivery of the raw material to the ultimate delivery to the utility furnace. Handling costs and environmental concerns have practically necessitated this all encompassing operation at the utility sites.
Focusing on the two main elements of this invention, blending and reclaiming, there are many advantages to performing these operations at the site. To eliminate the redundancy of equipment, coal can be loaded into storage facilities which will make it directly accessible to blending and transport means which will convey the coal to the plant furnace. This so-called "live" storage eliminates multiple transfers from inactive or "dead" storage sites.